Moved!

We've passed another milestone in pursuing my career change: we're now in Louisville. We closed on our new house last Thursday and moved in on Friday. We still have unpacked boxes all over the place. This house is much smaller than our home in Connecticut. Even though we got rid of alot of our stuff, we still have too much. It will take us some time to figure out where to put it all.

Independent-mindedness

I find Juan Williams's contributions to Fox News mildly amusing. I especially enjoyed his very passionate exclamation, today, about the three Republicans who at "at last" showed some independence of mind by voting against William Pryor. He often portrays Republicans as incapable of independent thought. Not once does it ever occur to him that only one Democrat, Ben Nelson (D, Nebraska) voted against their party line.

No Smoking Gun

Some great lines in an editorial about the Downing Street Memo by Michael Kinsley, today:

Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes a certain amount of ideological self-confidence. It takes a critical mass of citizens with extreme views and the time and energy to obsess about them. It takes a promotional infrastructure and the widely shared self-discipline to settle on a story line, disseminate it and stick to it.

Kinsley focusses only on the hearsay nature of this evidence: the memo is a summary of a discussion of C's impressions of the impressions of others of Bush's possible attitude. But Kinsley still accepts the weird and illiterate interpretation of the word "fixed" to mean "changed."

Did Kerry really release Navy records?

So, Kerry's must be covering something up. For a month he claimed to have signed the form, but then it turned out he hadn't mailed it. He's spent years trying to figure out how to have it both ways, again: signing the form without actually disclosing any information.

Chicago Sun Times:

There is nothing magic about signing a SF 180,' said former Naval Judge Advocate General Mark Sullivan. 'It is sort of like your checkbook. You can fill out a check for one dollar or a million. It is the same check form.'

'And the Globe story says Kerry sent it to the Navy Personnel Command, which is only a limited storage location. So it is not surprising that the Globe then notes that what they received was largely 'duplication' of records previously released. The Navy Personnel Command primarily stores a subset of service records rather than a person's full military records. There is no doubt there are a lot of after-action records missing from what Kerry has released,' said Sullivan.

Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs has already found a discrepancy confirmed by the Department of the Navy of 'at least a hundred pages' missing from those already disclosed by Kerry.

So how an SF 180 is filled out is as important as signing it. But no one in the press has yet claimed to have seen a copy of Kerry's SF-180. When asked if she had a copy of Kerry's SF 180, the Globe's Managing Editor Mary Jane Wilkinson said, 'I haven't seen it, and I don't know if anyone here has.'

Anything but the Bible!

Students at Karns Elementary School in Knoxville, TN, are allowed to read anything but the Bible during recess.

Intolerance in the Bible Belt:

Instead of bullying, fighting or other typical recess pastimes, Luke Whitson was reading. But his choice of literature has stirred the constitutional and cultural sensitivities of a public school principal.

Karns Elementary School Principal Cathy Summa 'abruptly interrupted certain fourth-grade students while they were in the midst of a Bible discussion during recess, demanded that they stop their activity at once, put their Bibles away and, from that point forward, cease from bringing their Bibles to school.' So, the Pentagon buys Korans and prayer carpets for Islamist terrorists, but a fourth-grader isn't allowed to read the Bible during recess? What wonderful ways our society condones stupendous hypocrisy.

The Knoxville school system argues that recess is not 'free time,' during which, apparently, students are considered out of the classroom environment and allowed to engage in harmless pursuits, like playing, gossiping and -- yes -- reading.

It's a fine mess that liberal activists have made for us: Defend the right to practice all religions -- except Christianity. They fight to fund government agencies that support artists who dip the cross in urine or splatter Mary with cow feces, but call upon the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions whenever a Koran is accidentally "kicked." It's unfortunate that young Luke has received such an early lesson in liberal intolerance.

From the Washington Times editorial page. Text of the Alliance Defense Fund's complaint is here.

Economists Set Priorities to Combat Disease and Poverty

The Copenhagen Consensus assesses the cost/benefit of investments in development projects addressing ten major challenges in the world, characterizing them as very good, good, fair, and bad. Projects to combat AIDS/HIV are very good, ranking as the highest priority; the Kyoto protocol is a bad investment with very high cost and little benefit. They also consider guest worker programs to be a bad investment.

The link to the .pdf file with their full list is here.

CFJ Reply to Boxer

The Committee for Justice has a response to Sen. Boxer's accusations against Janice Rogers Brown, yesterday.

108 Died In U.S. Custody

I was shocked when Ceci Connelly claimed on Fox News Special Report that close to 100 Iraqi and Afghani detainees have been murdered by U.S. troops. She is the least capable of the commentators on Special Report, so my expectations are always low when she's on. Last night was especially poor. She fumbled often, able only to cite Abu Ghraib as evidence for widespread, systemic abuse. Under some pressure, she claimed that 100 murders elsewhere have been documented.

I have been searching for such documentation. The closest thing I can find is this March story from CBS News, saying that 108 have died while in U.S. custody. However, this number includes those who died from natural causes, and the second sentence in the story says that one quarter of these may have been caused by abuse. These cases warrant investigation.

This is much more consistent with the number I've read previously, 27. It'll be interesting to see if there is any follow up on this tonight.

Hillary's Harangue

Senator Clinton continues the Democratic smear of Republicans:

I can tell you this: It's very hard to stop people who have no shame about what they're doing. It is very hard to tell people that they are making decisions that will undermine our checks and balances and constitutional system of government who don't care. It is very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth.

This strikes me as very risky on her part: there are web sites documenting her false claims, outright lies, and bizarre behavior.

My favorite is her claim to have been named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who was a completely unknown beekeeper when she was born and did not climb Mt. Everest until five years later.

The Definitive Story about the Press's Role in Watergate

The definitive story about Watergate was written nearly 31 years ago, in the July, 1974, Commentary article by Edward Jay Epstein.

But who was “Deep Throat” and what was his motivation for disclosing information to Woodward and Bernstein? The prosecutors at the Department of Justice now believe that the mysterious source was probably Mark W. Felt, Jr., who was then a deputy associate director of the FBI, because one statement the reporters attribute to “Deep Throat” could only have been made by Felt. (I personally suspect that in the best traditions of the New Journalism, “Deep Throat” is a composite character.) Whether or not the prosecutors are correct, it is clear that the arduous and time-consuming investigation by Woodward and Bernstein of Segretti was heavily based on FBI “302” reports, which must ultimately have been made available by someone in the FBI. The prosecutors suggest that there was a veritable revolt against the directorship of L. Patrick Gray, because he was “too liberal.” Specifically, he was allowing agents to wear colored shirts, grow their hair long, and was even recruiting women. More important, he had publicly reprimanded an FBI executive. According to this theory, certain FBI executives released the “302” files, not to expose the Watergate conspiracy or drive President Nixon from office, but simply to demonstrate to the President that Gray could not control the FBI, and therefore would prove a severe embarrassment to his administration. In other words, the intention was to get rid of Gray.

This past week's orgy of press self-congratulation and defense of anonymous sources has been very convenient for the Washington Post and its sister publication, Newsweek, but this is an old, familiar story. The only interesting thing about it is how little the press has changed.

A sustaining myth of journalism holds that every great government scandal is revealed through the work of enterprising reporters who by one means or another pierce the official veil of secrecy. The role that government institutions themselves play in exposing official misconduct and corruption therefore tends to be seriously neglected, if not wholly ignored, in the press. This view of journalistic revelation is propagated by the press even in cases where journalists have had palpably little to do with the discovery of corruption.

'My brain made me do it'

A story on advances on neuroscience and their effect on views of freedom and responsibility. Ties this discussion to the recent SCOTUS case, Roper v. Simmons, where the death penalty is prohibited because of the immaturity of a teenager's brain.

Intellectual Capital: Michael McGough

A Study in Abuse

Good article by John Hinderaker on handling the Koran at Gitmo. A Study in Abuse

Gulag Guantanamo Equivalency Test

Good comparison of Guantanamo and Soviet Gulag at The New Republic Online: TNR Online

At It Again

The 9/11 Commission Report was a must read last year. However, the commission's recommendations did not really follow from its analysis. It reminded me of an MBA case study group assignment: the students invariably make the same set of recommendations, including organizational realignments to solve "the communication problem" -- there's always a communication problem -- regardless of the specifics of the case. The commission was so sure of itself, though, that its members forced wholesale implementation of its recommendations on the administration, making it a campaign issue. The sheer arrogance of the commission was spectacular.

Now , they're at it again. They have simply decided to anoint themselves the guardians of American anti-terrorism policy.

The five Democrats and five Republicans who made up the panel are returning together to the public stage - this time, solely as private citizens and without subpoena power - to investigate the government's response to terrorist threats. The 9/11 Public Discourse Project, which has a small staff based in Washington, is underwritten by several prominent private foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Stem Cell Advances

Would this advance have occurred if Bush had not stood his ground?

In recent months, a number of researchers have begun to assemble intriguing evidence that it is possible to generate embryonic stem cells without having to create or destroy new human embryos.

The research is still young and largely unpublished, and in some cases it is limited to animal cells. ...

... the gathering consensus among biologists is that embryonic stem cells are made, not born -- and that embryos are not an essential ingredient. That means that today's heated debates over embryo rights could fade in the aftermath of technical advances allowing scientists to convert ordinary cells into embryonic stem cells.

'That would really get around all the moral and ethical concerns,' said James F. Battey, chief of the stem cell task force at the National Institutes of Health. The techniques under study qualify for federal grant support because embryos are not harmed, he noted. And eventually the work could boost the number of stem cell colonies, or lines, available for study by taxpayer-supported researchers."

No Evidence

Yesterday, William Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, admitted that the organization has no real evidence to substantiate its leaders' outrageous accusations against the Bush administration. Despite that, he affirms that the US maintains a gulag archipelago, a network of secret detention centers around the world so secret no one has any evidence they exist but no one can disprove they don't.

Adding to his gulag metaphor, he equated the Bush administration to Latin American dictatorships and the tragedy of the "desaparecidos." Schulz, of course, has no substantiation for this either, nor does he recognize any difference between a regime oppressing its own people and a nation at war.

Having admitted he doesn't really know what is happening anywhere, he claims the whole point of his accusations is to force the administration to permit an independent investigation: "'We don't know for sure what all is happening at Guantanamo and our whole point is that the United States ought to allow independent human rights organizations to investigate,' Mr. Schulz said, adding that Amnesty International was careful to use the word 'alleged' when accusing high-level Bush administration officials." This, of course, has become the liberal Democratic strategy: make outrageous, unsubstantiated accusations to force an "investigation," a fishing expedition to land more "evidence" to feed the cycle of exagerration.

Shulz's claims of independence are not credible. Here are some highlights from his bio on the Amnesty International USA's web site.

"Dr. William F. Schulz was appointed Executive Director of Amnesty International (USA) in March, 1994. An ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, he came to Amnesty after serving for fifteen years with the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA), the last eight (1985-93) as President of the Association.

During his years with Amnesty he has traveled extensively, both in the US and abroad, including a 2004 trip to Cuba under the sponsorship of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.

From 1985-93 he served on the Council of the International Association for Religious Freedom, the oldest international interfaith organization in the world. Throughout his career he has been outspoken in his opposition to the death penalty and his support for women's rights, gay and lesbian rights and racial justice, having organized, participated in demonstrations and written extensively on behalf of all four causes.

Dr. Schulz has served on the boards of People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the Communitarian Network and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, among others."

He also contributed the maximum allowable to Bush's opponent, John Kerry, in the last presidential election.

Given this man's background, it would be hard not to conclude he has an anti-evangelical, anti-Republican, pro-abortion, pro-gay-lobby bias. This is yet another formerly-respectable organization I have to write off.

Stem Cells in Hollywood

Scarlett Johansson explains why she favors embryonic stem cell research, “I mean, if they could eliminate diseases like Alzheimer’s and polio that would be incredible."
Moviehole.net

Apparently, she has not heard of the Salk vaccine nor the World Health Organization's pronouncement that polio has been eradicated. Neither is she familiar with this scandal: Of Stem Cells and Fairy Tales

"'PEOPLE NEED A FAIRY TALE,' Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, told Washington Post reporter Rick Weiss, explaining why scientists have allowed society to believe wrongly that stem cells are likely to effectively treat Alzheimer's disease. 'Maybe that's unfair, but they need a story line that's relatively simple to understand.'

Here's the story: Researchers have apparently known for some time that embryonic stem cells will not be an effective treatment for Alzheimer's, because as two researchers told a Senate subcommittee in May, it is a 'whole brain disease,' rather than a cellular disorder (such as Parkinson's). This has generally been kept out of the news. But now, Washington Post correspondent Rick Weiss, has blown the lid off of the scam, reporting that while useful abstract information might be gleaned about Alzheimer's through embryonic stem cell research, 'stem cell experts confess . . . that of all the diseases that may be someday cured by embryonic stem cell treatments, Alzheimer's is among the least likely to benefit.'"

It's silly to jump on a statement by such a young actress, but this is all too typical of the misunderstanding surrounding this issue. One of the panel discussions on last weekend's news programs had a panelist chastising Bush for banning stem cell treatments. This betrayed ignorance on a few levels.

First, there is no ban on stem cell research; there are restrictions of federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.

Second, if the cure for so many diseases is just around the corner using embryonic stem cells, those profit-hungry drug and biotech companies are free to develop them. The fact that none have raises the question as to how imminent these cures really are, doesn't it? If the situation were as many advocates claim, wouldn't the profiteers be in a mad rush to be the first to market with these cures?

Third, the only stem cell treatments that exist are not embryonic, but adult stem cells and umbilical cord stem cells. There are no restrictions on these. And, these are very promising. Every pro-life advocate is strongly in favor of encouraging these therapies.

So long as these Hollywood types continue to use their celebrity to draw attention to this issue and publicity-seeking politicians take advantage of reflected celebrity, we will continue to hear myths and fairy tales.

Political Thought: A Reading Program

Wonderful post at the Evangelical Outpost by Greg Forster, Ph.D. Yale, on required reading for development of political thought, beginning with Plato.

Expert Witness: Greg Forster on Political Thought

More on Gulag Guantanamo

The Washington Times story by Michelle Malkin on Guantanamo.

Power Line

"The Republicans who negotiated this deal got fleeced." Power Line

I agree.

Hey, Howard!

Yesterday's claim by Howard Dean that many Republicans have never earned an honest living in their lives strikes me as especially ironic coming from the head of the party that must rely on illegal voting by felons to win elections.

The News Tribune, Tacoma, WA:

On average, 74 percent of felons would have voted Democratic in presidential and U.S. Senate elections dating back to 1972, according to the study’s analysis of demographic and voting data.

Of Democratic presidential candidates, the study predicts that Bill Clinton’s successful 1996 re-election campaign would have gotten the highest percentage of felon votes, at 85.4 percent. Jimmy Carter’s failed 1980 re-election would have gotten the lowest, at 66.5 percent.

A state GOP-funded study by Jonathan Katz, a political science professor at the California Institute of Technology, estimates that Gregoire received 66.3 percent of the illegal felon votes.

And a study by Tony Gill, an associate political science professor at the University of Washington, estimates that Gregoire received 60.1 percent of felon votes in King County, Gregoire’s base and home to by far the largest number of illegal felon votes the GOP says were cast.

Compared with the national study, published in 2002 in the American Sociological Review, Gill writes that his study’s estimate “is too conservative, giving Ms. Gregoire the benefit of the doubt. In other words, the rate at which felons vote for a Democratic candidate is likely to be higher than the estimates provided by the precinct-level of analysis here.

The Democrats are so dependent on the felon vote that Hilary Clinton, John Kerry and others are pushing to force every state to enfranchise felons. John Fund on the Trail:

The Constitution grants states the authority to determine 'the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections,' but Hillary Clinton and John Kerry are pushing a Count Every Vote Act that would, among other things, force states to allow voters to register at the polls and declaring Election Day a federal holiday. And then they want to force every state to let felons vote--even though the 14th Amendment specifically permits states to disfranchise citizens convicted of 'participation in rebellion, or other crime.'

Forty-eight states deny the vote to at least some felons; only Vermont and Maine let jailbirds vote. Thirty-three states withhold the right to vote from those on parole. Eight deny felons the vote for life, unless they petition to have their rights restored, and the Clinton-Kerry proposal would force them to enfranchise felons (or 'ex-felons,' as Mrs. Clinton misleadingly calls them) once they've completed parole.

Mrs. Clinton says she is pushing her bill because she is opposed to 'disenfranchisement of legitimate American voters.' But it's hard not to suspect partisan motives. In a 2003 study, sociologists Chistopher Uggen and Jeff Manza found that roughly 4.2 million had been disfranchised nationwide, a third of whom had completed their prison time or parole. Taking into account the lower voter turnout of felons, they concluded that about one-third of them would vote in presidential races, and that would have overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates. Participation by felons, Messrs. Uggen and Manza estimated, also would have allowed Democrats to win a series of key U.S. Senate elections, thus allowing the party to control the Senate continuously from 1986 until at least this January.

Amnesty International's 'Gulags'

At one time Amnesty International was a respectable organization, but in just a few days they have undermined all their credibility. Equating Guantanamo with the Soviet gulag where an estimated 20 million slave laborers met their deaths is absurd.

For those who don't remember the gulags, here's an excellent summary. The Jawa Report: The Gulag Archipelego vs. Amnesty International's 'Gulags'

As the Wall Street Journal says, "A 'human rights' group that can't distinguish between Stalin's death camps and detention centers for terrorists who kill civilians can't be taken seriously."

Dean's Latest

I just watched excerpts from Howard Dean's latest speech. I haven't found a full transcript, yet, but here's a link to the USA Today story on-line.

I'm always amazed by those who somehow blame Bush for the "division" in the country, but never compare Republican statements with those of Democratic leaders: "But, [Dean] said, Republicans . . . have never made an honest living in their lives." He also "hates Republicans."

Dean regards his anti-Christian stump speech in California one of the highlights of his presidential campaign. In an interview he remembers: "'Finally I said I am tired of taking orders from the fundamentalist preachers any more, and when I said that, the entire room exploded. Everybody felt that this incredibly oppressive group of people had taken over the country and there was no reason to hope anymore."

This is the man that's going to expand the Democratic party?

Update:

Video available at Trey Jackson's site

The Krugman Contest

I sometimes look back over my posts on this blog and wonder how I became such a conservative; I never would have imagined it several years ago.

One of the major turning points for me of course, as for many others, was the Bork hearings in 1987. I took away a deeply abiding distrust of Biden and Leahy: they are masters of smear without conscience. But even those hearings only effected a slight, and reluctant, change in political orientation.

One of the most recent influences, however, has been the New York Times and its columnists. I subscribed to the NYT for a couple years when commuting weekly to Boston. I had a little apartment there, with nothing to do outside of my work hours except read newspapers and watch TV. Rather than subscribe to the Boston Globe, I chose to take the NYT since I could learn what was in the Globe at the lunch table every day. I found the blatant bias in the NYT very offputting -- the misuse of statistics, especially.

I often read the NYT with a calculator because I discovered the most telling facts were often buried in the articles, contradicting the headlines. A good, recent and typical example, though after my two-year subscription, was the NYT's reporting on Bush's proposal to "cut Medicaid spending by $10 billion." An alert reader with a calculator could mine the truth out of that article: Bush proposed a $2.5 billion reduction in the $30 billion automatic annual increase in the federal Medicaid budget over 4 years. In other words, Bush proposed a reduction in the rate of automatic increase from 15% to 13.75%, a very reasonable proposal and not at all the dramatic cut in spending the NYT attempted to mislead their readers into believing. The numbers were actually in the article -- cleverly disguised.

Nowhere is this distortion more rampant that in Paul Krugman's columns. Donald Okrent, the NYT's departing readers' representative, is finally coming clean about Krugman.

Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers . . . I laid off for so long because I also believe that columnists are entitled by their mandate to engage in the unfair use of statistics, the misleading representation of opposing positions, and the conscious withholding of contrary data. But because they’re entitled doesn’t mean I or you have to like it, or think it’s good for the newspaper.

Krugman is the Biden/Leahy of economics: truth is expendible, the smear is all.

The Krugman Truth Squad has a contest for the best-ever, most-outrageous Krugman statements in six categories. This ought to be fun.